“Yes, I imagine this would be difficult to explain away.” Bastian hauled the front of the cart up behind her. Gabe stayed at the back, keeping it steady. She wondered if he’d chosen that position because it was farthest away from her.
Slowly, Lore moved out of the alley, Bastian and Gabe and their uncanny cargo following. She remembered the route, rounding the turns and taking the shortcuts without any conscious thought needed. For ten years, Val’s crew had worked out of the same warehouse, and she remembered how to get there even though part of her wished she could forget.
She hadn’t wanted to get them involved. Even today, when it’d become clear that answers might be found nearer to her poison-running past than her falsely noble present, Lore hadn’t wanted to go to Val and Mari, had wanted to keep them as far from all this as possible. Both to keep them safe, and because the idea of seeing them pried at a very precise wound in her heart, like pushing on a bruise.
But there was really no choice now.
Fog hung low over the street, thickening the closer they drew to the harbor. The full moon reflected on the black water, visible in the distance as a glimmering expanse not unlike the sky above it.
Looking at the moon made her think of the upcoming eclipse, the ball on her twenty-fourth birthday.
The warehouse was a long, dark block of a building, with virtually nothing to distinguish it from the other long, dark blocks of buildings around it, and intentionally left to look abandoned. The roof sagged in the middle. The gutters were full of dried gull shit. Water marks bloomed over the rough wooden paneling of the outer walls.
Most of the other buildings were actually empty, a haven for revenants looking for someplace to sleep off their latest fix, or for a quiet place to finally die after ossifying themselves into too-long lives. Val never kicked anyone out of the empty warehouses, but she’d send in people to look for bodies occasionally. Especially in the warmer months, when the little flesh they had left started to stink. They burned the corpses they found, didn’t bother trying to figure out next of kin to contact. If someone was crawling down to die in the empty warehouses by the harbor, they didn’t have anyone looking for them, and probably didn’t care much about reaching the Shining Realm. Not many people out here did.
“Where, exactly, are we going?” Bastian barely sounded out of breath. When she looked back at him, the muscles of his shoulders were tense against the blood-stiff fabric of his shirt. It only drew attention to his corded arms, the well-formed plane of his chest.
She looked away. “Poison runner den.” No sense dithering over it.
“Oh, excellent,” Bastian said. “I’ve never been to one.”
Behind him, Gabe was still silent.
The streets around the warehouse were empty, which was typical. Val made her crew stagger times they were seen near the headquarters so as not to draw attention. It must just be force of habit now. Val had her papers, she was officially sanctioned by Church and Crown. Turning Lore over to Anton had bought her a veil of legitimacy.
Streetlights were far behind them, now, and the only illumination was the round moon, the scattering of stars. It made the building loom like an executioner’s block.
Lore paused before the door, nerves writhing around her middle. But she had a mostly stone man to hide until she figured out how to change him back, and this was the only place she could think to do it.
So she knocked. A familiar pattern, ingrained in her since she was thirteen. Two sharp raps, then two more with a four-second pause between them, and a final drag of her knuckles.
It opened immediately. “Gods dead and dying, what took—” Mari’s rich alto voice faltered as her willowy form filled the door. Her eyes widened. “Lore?”
Her lip wobbled, despite herself. “Hi, Mari.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The bonds of family are sacred, but they are not always bound in blood.
—Myroshan proverb
The inside of the warehouse completely belied the shabbiness of the outside. The floors were well swept, the ceilings high and built up with multiple layers of wood and tin to keep the deliberate disrepair of the roof from affecting the interior. Cots lined the walls, some made and some not—most of the crew didn’t live here, and Val and Mari had a small apartment above their office, but they kept beds just in case someone needed a place to stay. To the right, the open office door spilled golden light into the dim, cast from a gas lamp at the edge of the desk. The lamp was Mari’s prized possession. It’d been a gift from Val for their anniversary, when Mari couldn’t stand to do their accounting by candlelight anymore.
A few boxes were stacked in the shadows at the back of the space, proof that a drop would happen in the next few days. Val didn’t keep poison here unless she had to.
Mari stood in front of the office door, arms crossed, staring at Gabe and Bastian and the cart behind them with an unreadable expression as Lore rattled off their story. Lore kept to the truth, mostly, though she didn’t tell Mari why they were at the docks in the first place. She wanted to, though. Seeing one of her mothers had made the pain of Val’s betrayal fall away; Lore felt like a child again, eager to spill everything to one of her surrogate parents and let them fix it.
She also kept Gabe and Bastian’s identities out of the story. Telling Mari that the Sun Prince of Auverraine and one of the Presque Mort were in her warehouse was sure to fly like a dead bird.
When Lore finally dropped into silence, Mari nodded slowly, mulling the story over with her lips pressed to a thin line. “So,” she said, dark eyes wary, “you want us to keep a dead person—”
“Not dead.” It was the first time Gabe had spoken since the alley, and it startled Lore nearly as much as it did Mari. Next to him, Bastian stayed quiet, arms crossed and eyes thoughtful. They both still wore their masks, though Lore had taken hers off, and it had the disconcerting effect of making them look nearly like the same person from the corner of her eye.
“A not dead person,” Mari conceded, “in our warehouse until you can figure out how to fix them.”
“It won’t be long,” Lore said. Her voice had the same almost wheedling edge it’d carried when she was a child, begging for something she wanted. “In fact, I’m going to try in just a minute or two.”
She felt Gabe’s gaze snap to the back of her neck, raising gooseflesh. Lore bristled. Leaving Milo in this state was bad, trying to fix him was bad—she wasn’t going to please Gabe, no matter what she did, and she wished she didn’t care.
“We just needed a place to bring him,” she finished quietly. “We couldn’t leave him in the alley.”
“No, I suppose you couldn’t.” Mari sighed, reaching up to tighten the knot holding her silky scarf in place over her the twisted lengths of her hair, making the sea-glass beads at the ends clink. They must’ve caught her right before she went to bed. “Fine. He can stay.”